Start with the bodies. Millions of them, piled up across eight decades, while the world's most ambitious peace institution sat in its marble tower on the East River. Vietnam burned for years without the Security Council ever attempting real intervention. Congo has hosted UN peacekeepers since 1960 and still cycles through war after war: presence without protection. In Rwanda, eight hundred thousand people were slaughtered in a hundred days, and at the height of the killing the Council actually voted to shrink its peacekeeping force, ignoring the desperate warnings of its own commander on the ground. In Bosnia, the UN-declared "safe area" of Srebrenica became a massacre site under the UN's own flag, as Dutch peacekeepers stood aside while roughly eight thousand men and boys were executed.

Then came Iraq. In 2003, the United States and Britain invaded without Council authorisation, after failing to win it, claiming weapons of mass destruction that were never found. The state collapsed. The region still lives with the wreckage more than twenty years on. Libya followed in 2011: a narrow mandate to protect civilians, stretched by NATO into a war for regime change, a lesson Russia and China have never forgotten and have used ever since to justify blocking action on Syria. Yemen, Sudan, and now Gaza and Iran. Different decades, different flags, the same pattern: silence, a mandate bent out of shape, or a decision simply ignored by whoever is strong enough to ignore it.

That is the part that hurts most,........

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